Craig Virgin Helps Guide Colorado HS to State Title

Being a high school cross country coach can be a tough gig. You rely on a group of adolescents to log big summer mileage and then hope they have the work ethic and focus to adhere to your training through the competition season once school starts.

Bob Nicolls did that, plus he read respected training books and went to coaching clinics. But he also decided to take a slightly different approach four years ago when he agreed to help Denver's Regis Jesuit High School as the program's unpaid head boys cross country coach. A successful businessman and former high school runner, Nicolls, 52, wanted to help rebuild the school's dormant program so his sons, Danny and Bobby Nicolls, as well as their teammates, could maximize their budding talents as runners.

On a whim, he did a Google search for the biggest name he's ever known – Craig Virgin – even though he'd never really met him.

When Nicolls was a prep runner in suburban Chicago in the mid-1970s, Virgin was an Illinois legend in his own time. As a senior, the record-breaking distance runner from the small downstate farm community of Lebanon ran away with the state cross country title in a still-standing 3-mile record of 13:50.7 and then sped to a national record 8:40.9 2-mile on the track the next spring. He went on to win an NCAA cross country title for the University of Illinois before becoming a top runner on the international level.

"I came from what I call the Neanderthal days of the '70s, where you'd run 120 miles every week in the summer and just burn everybody up," recalls Nicolls, a 1:54 half-miler who helped his high school finish second in the state in the 2-mile relay in 1976 but opted not to run in college. "So I was going to coaching forums and talking to different coaches and found if you talked to 10 people, you'd get 11 different ideas.

"And then I thought about hiring Craig as a consultant because I figured he was a guy who could help design a program to the point where I could get comfortable and get things going. It turned out to be much more than that. He looked at it as much more than a job. He took it very personally."

Since retiring from a long professional career that included two world cross country titles, three U.S. Olympic team berths, an American record at 10,000m and a runner-up finish in the Boston Marathon, Virgin, 55, has had his hand in many aspects of the sport – including TV commentary, race promotion and motivational speaking – but he'd done only a little bit of coaching.

Nicolls and Jesuit athletic director Kelly Doherty checked with the Colorado High School Activities Association to make sure such a consulting relationship wasn't violating any rules.

"I gave it some thought and told him I was willing to give it a try to see if it could work out," Virgin says. "If it didn't work out, I figured we could end the relationship after the season. But I was kind of excited about it."